Happy Branchiversary: One Year Of Running A Design Studio Plus 5 Tips For New Business Owners

During the week, I was holed up in Palm Springs for Designer Vaca, an annual retreat for female creatives. The buzz of nervousness and excitement was palpable — we’d traveled in from different states and even countries to network and learn from one another.

Designer Vaca isn’t just an annual getaway for me, though — it’s also an important marker in my life. It’s a reminder of how much can happen in just a year when you put your mind and every ounce of energy into something. A few days before Designer Vaca last year, I launched Branch so being there this year reminded me of that fundamental time.

A year ago, I took a chance and quit all outside design work to run Branch full time. I’d been freelancing and building my clientele for five years prior and I knew it was finally time to overcome my fears and lay everything on the line. Big life changes can be paralyzing but in a way, because my schedule was so packed at the time, I never had the chance to overthink things. The month before Branch launched, I’d been in Austin, Greece, London and New York with The Blogcademy. By the time I got home from all that traveling, I had less than 2 weeks to get all my content together, design my website and go live. The day we launched, I had to be in Malibu for a client meeting and two days after that, in Palm Springs for Designer Vaca. There was no wiggle room.

I always say that it’s best to launch and learn and we did just that. Things were far from perfect — I’d taken all the photos, written all the copy and Star pulled a few all nighters to push the site live. Even in its imperfect state, business was solid from day one. Within a week, we’d booked out for a month. Within one month, we were booked for three.

Running your own business is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. Let’s be honest — there are a lot easier, less stressful ways to make a living. It’s true that a lot of businesses fail in the first year and I didn’t want Branch to be a casualty. A good way to avoid falling into that pit is to understand your business from the inside out so I told myself that in the first year, I was going to take on as much work as I possibly could and learn from it — I wanted to really figure out what we wanted more of and what we wanted less of. I’m a firm believer that as an owner, before you can delegate to others, you need to understand the ins and outs of your own business.

I want to share a few nuggets of wisdom that we’ve gathered over the last year to help you with your own creative business:

1. Launch and learn.

When you have very little time to get up and running like we did, your site might not be perfect. The point is that even if you sit on your idea and polish it to perfection, you’re losing valuable momentum. We launched with the best we could do at the time and built our clientele as quickly as possible. Now, it’s time to step back, reevaluate our online presence and rebuild our site and media kit. The thing to remember is that it’s not a great idea to invest too much upfront — even with all the market research in the world, you never know if a business idea will actually resonate. It’s better to work on a shoestring budget, figure out what works and then rework your offerings based on those learnings.

2. Attract now, repel later.

As a new business, in the beginning it’s a good idea to stay open to different kinds of clients. Learn from each and build a solid financial cushion before specializing. Once you’ve passed the year mark, step back, reevaluate and decide who you’d like to attract more of. Focusing in on a particular niche will help you to position yourself as an expert and when you specialize, you’ll be able to charge more for your services.

3. Geographical locations matter less now than ever.

Branch is based in Portland, Oregon but none of our clients are local. Like many U.S. cities, Portland is saturated with hundreds of design studios so we instead focused on the world. By employing this mindset, we’ve picked up clients in Seattle, London, San Francisco, Brisbane, Fargo, Perth and New York. The design industry is a lot more open these days — it’s totally possible to keep overhead low, run your business from a tiny town and still rule the world thanks to an internet connection.

4. Share every project you do, no matter how small.

Part of the growth of Branch this year can be attributed directly to social media. We shared projects the second they were finished across Dribbble, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and our blog. Not every project was a hit but there were a few that got picked up and repinned hundreds of times. The click-throughs from Pinterest especially helped build our client base. Dedicate as much time as you possibly can to social media — there’s nothing better than free marketing!

5. Raise your rates incrementally.

When Branch launched, we kept our rates fairly reasonable for a design studio. We wanted to make sure we were booked out and stayed busy. As inquiries piled up, we revamped our pricing. The key is to not do massive increases all at once — if you do this, you run the risk of stripping out your client base. Instead, be realistic with steady price increases. Instead of tacking on $1,000.00 to your most popular package all at once, it’s better to do four increases of $250.00 over the course of a year.

It’s been a great first year at Branch — we’ve been mentioned in Computer Arts, featured on The Dieline and asked to submit our projects to multiple design books. Hard work and dedication does pay off. If you want something bad enough, you just have to push fear aside and go for it, and see what happens. It may end up being a rollercoaster ride…but you’ll never know what’s possible unless you try. Thanks to Star, Cathy, Joey, Rocky and Carey for being there from the beginning and the clients who believed in us.

Your turn: I want to know — what do you have in the pipeline that scares you? What are your big dreams when it comes to running your own business?

Love this advice, and agree especially with “launch and learn”. I’m still working on it but learning not to spend a million hours agonizing over perfection (when we all know it doesn’t exist) has been everything. Ya gotta ship it!

Happy Branchaversary 😀 Congrats, Shauna!!! This post was awesome, love reading inspiring stories like this one. They always make me really excited and help reignite my own fires <3 Wishing you many more incredibly successful years ahead 😉

Happy anniversary! You are a true inspiration, and I absolutely love tip #1. Even though I have a hard time sticking to it, reading it now, gave me a well needed kick in the butt to finish a long overdue personal project. Do it now, refine later…

Totally. I was never 100% happy with the Branch site (because I never had the time to give it much thought) but it worked! I don’t know about you but I find that when I sit on a project too long and give myself too much time, by the time it’s done I want to change everything…so in my case, it makes sense to move really fast. Haha. Good luck with your project!

Congrats to the first year! And thank you for the kick in the ass. I have been wanting to sell my house design plans online for years now and it’s the perfectionist in me that would have never made it happen. Great advice, all of it.

Great tips! I’ve been ‘selling myself’ as a self-employed adult-ed teacher for about nine months now and I really learned a lot from ‘taking any job’ (such as I’d rather not work in the evening and I prefer teaching large groups to one-on-one).

You’ve made me think about having a better social media presence, instead of relying on agencies so much. Good luck with your next year(s)!

Fantastic post – being in my first few months of business after launching in a frenzy of positivity, hurriedly putting together an online presence to make the most of all the enquiries…I particularly identified with the “we launched with the best we had at the time” and “re-evaluate later”. I often look with a ctitical eye already, but like yourselves had to do the best I had at the time! Reassuring to hear of another experience and great tips – thanks!

So many good nuggets of advice and wisdom. Thank you for sharing what you’ve learned in year one, Shawna. I’m in the middle of year one (I brought on 2 additional designers in June and our developer more recently). Reflecting those changes and growing has all been a lot of work and learning as we go, but it’s so worth it! Congrats & happy anniversary!

I really think the best thing to do is to just dive in and learn as you go because there’s only so much you can learn from books, blogs, etc. I just took a look at your site and you’re doing great work — keep it up and here’s to continued growth!

Congratulations on having Branch for one full year! I’m inspired and amazed!! Your advice rally spoke to me especially about just starting and tweaking as you go along. Its all a process! Great post and thanks for all you are doing

Congratulations on having Branch for one full year! I’m inspired and amazed!! Your advice rally spoke to me especially about just starting and tweaking as you go along. Its all a process! Great post and thanks for all you are doing

Nice to meet you!

I'm Shauna, a graphic designer and entrepreneur. I spend my days as the Creative Director of Branch, a boutique design studio. This is my personal blog, which has been going strong since 2007. I'm obsessed with shoes, squirrels and traveling. Read more…

Search

Search for:

Branch

Project Prescription

Very Very V

Questions / Advice

If have a design question or you're itching for advice in your college education or creative career, please drop me a line at: advice@nubbytwiglet.com.

Disclaimer

Nubby Twiglet contains paid advertising and affiliate links. My blog
and posts feature items I genuinely love and sponsorship opportunities
are chosen very carefully. Any items which have been provided for
review are disclosed within posts via a "care of" notation. Sponsored
posts will be noted as such in the credits.